Our People:

First and foremost, the health and safety of our employees is our top priority. In addition to the travel guidance of public health authorities, we have restricted international and domestic travel through the end of April. As of March 16, we have made working from home mandatory for all employees, with limited exceptions, and optimized virtual meetings to help them do so. Our systems and applications support our employees to work securely anywhere in the world and have autoscaled seamlessly to account for the shift.

Business Continuity Planning:

Our customers and partners expect us to provide them with great products, support and services regardless of the conditions or environment. Our business continuity plans have allowed us to continue with our operations and remain available to them. These plans are consistent with industry best practices and include workarounds for possible disruptions to our people, facilities, applications, dependencies, and vendors, and are based on an all-hazards and multi-scenario approach. 

As well as supporting customers to enable their own secure remote workforce, we are fully leveraging Prisma Access to securely connect all employees to the applications they need, both in the cloud and in our data centers or offices. The majority of apps and infrastructure we use are SaaS or hosted in public cloud infrastructure like GCP, AWS and Azure providing resiliency and scalability as needed. 

We have transitioned our internal Security Operations Center to a remote model in which all our analysts are working from home—the SOC is fully operational and continues to monitor for threats as our own user population shifts to remote work via Prisma Access. 

Supply Chain:

Although some of our components come from China, we manufacture our hardware in the United States. We have ample supplies and spares for a majority of our models, and are closely engaged with our supply chain partners to ensure our customers’ needs are met where possible. As the situation evolves, we will continue to watch our inventories and work to minimize any disruption to the greatest extent, however, delays may be possible.

Services and Support:

While we have shifted largely to remote working, our Service and Support operations are fully operational and continue to meet the support needs of our customers and also help them transition to a secure remote workforce. For questions or support, we encourage customers to use the LIVE communities, including the Knowledge Base,  or open a case via the Customer Support Portal.

This statement was updated March 22, 2020.

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Funding will support vulnerable populations, nonprofits and small businesses impacted, as well as national and global public health response efforts

This is an unprecedented moment in time, with the pandemic requiring companies and sectors to stand together in an urgent, coordinated global response. At Palo Alto Networks, we are proud to join forces with 24 other Bay Area companies to commit an initial $22 million in collective funding for organizations on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. Funds will support the evolving local, regional and global response efforts through several beneficiaries. 

To align efforts, increase impact and encourage other companies to get involved, we are coming together to support the CDC Foundation's Emergency Response Fund, the United Nations Foundation’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund or the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s COVID-19 Coronavirus Regional Response Fund.

Funding for the CDC Foundation’s Emergency Response Fund is meeting rapidly evolving response needs around the world. These funds will help communities and public health responders meet the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Philanthropic and private sector support is critical for use alongside government funding to address needs that arise in emergency responses where speed and flexibility are paramount to saving and protecting lives,” said Judy Monroe, MD, president and chief executive officer of the CDC Foundation. “That’s why flexible philanthropic and private sector support is imperative. We are incredibly grateful to see everyone coming together at this time to address the very dangerous coronavirus threat.”

Funding for the United Nations Foundation’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund will support the global public health response. These funds will directly support the World Health Organization’s work to help countries prevent, detect and respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“All of us have a personal stake in conquering this pandemic," said Elizabeth Cousens, President & CEO of the UN Foundation. "And we can bend the curve if we take swift, smart action now. Contributions to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund will support the World Health Organization’s lifesaving work – and we are immensely grateful."

Funding for the Silicon Valley Community Foundation’s COVID-19 Coronavirus Regional Response Fund will support organizations in each of the 10 Bay Area counties. These funds will specifically support low-income individuals and families, nonprofit organizations and small businesses that are impacted by this crisis. 

“We and our Bay Area community foundation partners are proud to lead this effort to raise funds and shepherd critical resources for those most in need in our region during this unprecedented global crisis. We are grateful that local companies are committing themselves to helping our communities. In such uncertain times, it is uplifting to witness the philanthropic and business sectors coming together to take powerful action,” said Nicole Taylor, Silicon Valley Community Foundation President and CEO.

We are joining with Autodesk, Box, DocuSign, Cisco, Dropbox, GitHub, Intuit, LinkedIn, NetApp, Okta, PagerDuty, Pledge 1%, Postmates, Pure Storage, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Silicon Valley Bank, Slack, SurveyMonkey, Twilio, Workday, Zoom Video Communications and Zuora in this effort. We urge other companies to join us in supporting their local and global communities during this evolving crisis. 

To get involved, visit the CDC Foundation's Emergency Response Fund, the United Nations Foundation COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund and Silicon Valley Community Foundation COVID-19 Regional Response Fund.

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We have a number of solutions ready to go to help you secure your remote workforce, and we’ve ramped up our support to help.

GlobalProtect for existing NGFW customers: Every Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall is designed to support always-on, secure access with GlobalProtect. We’ve had several customers ask us about expediting additional hardware capacity as their remote workforces grow. We’ve analyzed our supply chain and inventory position, and we’re ready to help.

Prisma Access: Prisma Access is a globally distributed cloud service that scales automatically to provide the needed capacity for your remote workers. It offers the same security functionality as our next-generation firewalls, but without the need to deploy new infrastructure. As the situation changes globally, this means organizations can maintain business continuity as Prisma Access will auto-scale to wherever capacity is needed:  

• If you would like Prisma Access, we understand time is of the essence, so we are offering free, accelerated deployment and onboarding of your remote users. 
• For existing Prisma Access customers who need additional capacity, we have you covered for any unanticipated spikes for mobile users, at no additional cost for 90 days. 

To learn more, please contact our sales and support team at rapid-response@paloaltonetworks.com. Our commitment is to support you in any way possible to help rapidly deploy a secure mobile workforce.

At Palo Alto Networks, we are working hard to help ensure the health and safety of our employees, customers, and partners during the COVID-19 outbreak. We’ve given employees work-from-home options and restricted non-critical travel. For our customers and partners, we will continue to be available to you, in many cases remotely, and have shared our full guidance here.

To learn more about architecture and configuration options for remote workforces, hear customer examples and get questions answered about deployment, watch an on-demand recording of Field CTO Jason Georgi's webinar, "Securely Connect and Scale Remote Workforces."

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Applications moving to the cloud and increased user mobility are changing the way networking and network security services must be delivered. The future of network security is in the cloud, and this new model is known as a “secure access service edge,” or SASE (pronounced “sassy”). Palo Alto Networks founder and CTO Nir Zuk has been driving this change for the past few years with the Prisma Access product, the industry’s most comprehensive SASE. Here, Nir explains why SASE is the logical evolution for network security. This is the first in an ongoing series in which Palo Alto Networks thought leaders explore the core tenets of an integrated, effective SASE solution, and more broadly, its implementation and implications.

In a cloud-driven world, security needs to be unified, consistent and delivered from the cloud that it’s chartered to protect. This statement transcends my entire career in security, which has required constant evolution to keep up with changes in technology and secure users, applications and data. That focus remains. However, when it comes to the future of network security and the coming convergence, the legacy point-product approach is no longer effective. 

Nearly 25 years ago, I was the principal developer of the industry’s first stateful inspection firewall. Those were the early days of the internet, and back then the prominent firewall technology was stateless access control lists (ACLs). ACLs were not able to deal with the emergence of stateful applications, such as internet audio and video applications (or even good old FTP), so a new approach was clearly necessary. An attempt at using proxy technology proved futile, as proxies were too slow and had the tendency to break many of these applications. Stateful inspection proved to be both useful and secure, which is why it has since dominated the network security market. 

Almost 15 years ago, it became apparent that the explosion in the number of internet applications was challenging stateful inspection, so taking a new approach was again necessary. Early attempts at responding to the challenge with proxy technology emerged (for the second time!). However, they failed once more due to the proxy’s inherent poor performance and its inability to inspect all types of network traffic. I felt I had to fix the firewall again, which led me to start Palo Alto Networks and build a replacement for stateful inspection – the App-ID-based Next-Generation Firewall – which today is, by far, the leading firewall in the market.

Today we are witnessing yet another change in applications that is driving yet another change to network security. This time, applications are moving from corporate data centers to the cloud – both SaaS and public cloud. Cloud adoption is challenging firewall architecture again and requires me to respond. And yes, early attempts at solving the challenge are happening with a proxy, which are failing for the same reasons they did before.

It’s time to fix network security. Again.

Over time, organizations have typically assembled quite a few network security infrastructures. There is infrastructure for securing branch offices, where traffic is typically backhauled over an IP-VPN (think MPLS) network back to corporate headquarters or data centers, and internet traffic is routed from there through the organization’s network security stack. Then there is the network security infrastructure for allowing remote access into the corporate data center. 

As applications move to the cloud, the old method of forcing all branch, user and partner traffic back through the corporate headquarters or data centers no longer makes sense. It makes much more sense to deliver the same network security stack from the cloud, such that traffic destined for the cloud does not have to hit corporate networks, and less traffic needs to go to corporate data centers.

By delivering network security from the cloud, you can protect users, applications and data, regardless of where they are. 

SASE: A More Secure Everywhere

Gartner has proposed a new model for networking and network security in the cloud, known as the “secure access service edge,” or SASE, pronounced “sassy.” In Gartner’s words:

“The secure access service edge is an emerging offering combining comprehensive WAN capabilities with comprehensive network security functions (such as SWG, CASB, FWaaS and ZTNA) to support the dynamic secure access needs of digital enterprises.” 

Effectively, Gartner asserts SASE is able to meet the demands of cloud and mobile environments, addressing the challenges with traditional network and security architectures. 

I agree with this concept, and in my mind, it’s relatively simple. SASE is the convergence of different access and network security methods into one cohesive platform. Perhaps most importantly, however, this cohesive platform must ensure a seamless user experience. It must be built on a high-performance global network, which is beyond the capability of most smaller vendors. SASE demands a level of integration that’s unprecedented in the security industry. It’s unlike other approaches in the fragmented security industry, which has extremely low barriers to entry.

The cybersecurity industry has worked hard to convince customers that they need to work with dozens of vendors and use dozens of point products and technologies. Yet the future of network security is in the cloud, and security vendors must evolve in order to effectively secure customers anywhere and everywhere. 

At Palo Alto Networks, we foresaw this shift and built a compelling SASE solution. Prisma Access delivers the networking and networking security that organizations need in a SASE architecture designed for all traffic, all applications and all users. 

Learn more about SASE in our 10 Tenets of an Effective SASE Solution ebook.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner, The Future of Network Security Is in the Cloud, Neil MacDonald, Lawrence Orans, Joe Skorupa, 30 August 2019.

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Gartner recognized Palo Alto Networks as a Leader for the eighth time in its 2019 Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls. We’ve achieved the highest position for ability to execute and furthest position for completeness of vision in the Magic Quadrant. 

Palo Alto Networks defined the network security market with our next-generation firewall. In the last seven months, we have made significant improvements to the next-generation firewall to extend our Leader position. Now, the fastest-ever next-generation firewall from Palo Alto Networks has more than 60 new features and a revolutionary new DNS subscription.

Our Next-Generation Firewalls enable organizations to continually improve security effectiveness and efficiency – across the network, cloud and endpoints, including servers and mobile devices. Network security remains a core element to enterprises large and small, and we are always striving to innovate and help shape this space. 

In a five-star review, one systems integration specialist described Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall as “stable and reliable, full of features to suit almost any environment or situation.”

Our Next-Generation Firewalls secure businesses with a prevention-focused architecture that is easy to deploy and operate, use automation to reduce manual effort so that security teams can focus on what matters, and help customers easily adopt new security innovations. The efficacy of our Next-Generation Firewalls is evident in the trust placed in Palo Alto Networks by 65,000 customers in more than 150 countries. We’re honored to receive the highest Security Effectiveness Score and “Recommended” rating in the recent NSS Labs 2018 NGFW Group Test. We’re proud of our continued recognition as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and a 2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Enterprise Network Firewall (a distinction based entirely on verified customer feedback.)

To read a complimentary copy of the complete report, visit: http://go.paloaltonetworks.com/2019gartnermq.  

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls, Rajpreet Kaur, Adam Hils, Jeremy D'Hoinne, John Watts, 17 September 2019.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Palo Alto Networks.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner Peer Insights reviews constitute the subjective opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences, and do not represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.

Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.

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